224 BYZANTINE LITERATURE
writes his Christian epics, in which he celebrates the victory
of the Emperor Heraclius over Rome's hereditary enemy,
the Persian: the altars of the fire-worshippers are overthrown
and the True Cross, rescued from Persian captivity, is
restored to the Holy City, Jerusalem. But this Christian epic
is no longer written in hexameters: it preserves with faultless
accuracy the quantitative iambic metre of the classical age,
but in feeling it is already a twelve-syllabled line of accentual
verse with an accent on the last syllable but one.
These examples may serve to illustrate the character of
this first period of transition and re-creation. It is followed
by a gap in literary history of some 200 years (A.D. 650-850).
The Empire was fighting its life and death struggle with the
Arab invaders and the early Caliphate: Africa, Egypt, and
Syria were lost to the infidel: new foes—the Slav and the
Bulgar—were threatening Rome's hold upon the Balkan
peninsula. Men wielded the sword and not the pen. The
literature of the Iconoclasts has perished, and even from the
side of the defenders of the icons, apart from theological
writings, we have only the world chronicles which were
produced within the shelter of the monasteries. It is in the
seventh century, however, that Maximus the Confessor
carried on the mystical tradition of Dionysius the Areopa-
gite, while in the eighth John of Damascus restated in
classical form the orthodox faith of the East Roman Church.
The third period begins with the literary revival of the
ninth century, which is associated with the name of the Pa-
triarch of Constantinople, Photius. The University of the
capital is re-founded. After the victories of the Macedonian
house men have time to study once more their inheritance
from the past, and in the tenth century the imperial traditions
are renewed by the scholar Emperor Constantine Porphyro-
genitus: the preservation of those traditions was in his view
a service rendered to the commonwealth. Towards the
middle of the eleventh century the popular songs which had
celebrated the military triumphs of the Amorian and Basilian
emperors are taken up and woven into the earliest form of the
epic of Digenes Akritas, the defender of the Asiatic march
against the Saracen emirs.1
1 See p. 245 infra.